Ministers are bracing themselves for a roasting over Individual Learning Accounts in tomorrow's report by MPs on the £271m debacle.

Capita, the facilities management company, is also expected to be severely criticised over its administration of the scheme in the report by the Commons education and skills committee.

The flagship scheme, designed to encourage adults to take up learning by offering up to £200 towards the cost of studies, is nonetheless enthusiastically endorsed by the committee.

The report makes clear that a successor should be up and running as soon as possible, but this time with the prototype's critical weaknesses tightened up. And Capita should not take for granted that it will be administering the revised programme.

John Healey, the adult skills minister, is expected to announce "son of ILA" imminently.

The report, the select committee's third of this current session, is likely to call for a proper registration of approved learning providers authorised to participate in ILAs.

In evidence given over a number of sessions earlier this year, members heard that the decision had been taken in the DfES not to restrict the programme to existing learning providers with proven track records, such as colleges. By making it easy for new providers to join the scheme it was felt there would be a better chance of attracting a wider spread of learners.

Registration was as simple as filling in a form and sending it off. For that, the 9,000 learning providers who signed up were given access to the computer system and the means to draw down funds from learners' accounts.

The report will also demand that money released to providers is more easily and carefully tracked in any successor scheme.

It accepts the official explanation given by education ministers that fraud and abuse of the scheme were their reasons for pulling the plug in late November rather than Treasury concerns over its escalating and uncapped costs. But it will also note that the Treasury has so far failed to provide answers to questions about this.

It is one of the crueller twists of politics that the ministers taking the heat from the report and the evidence sessions preceding it were not those in office when the ILA programme was devised and when arrangements were thrashed out with Capita over its running. David Blunkett was education secretary and Baroness Blackstone was the relevant minister.

The report is expected to say some hard words about the DfES's handling of ILAs, implying there has been a pattern of schemes with inadequate financial controls going back to further education franchising scandals in the mid-1990s.

The suggestion will be clear that the department should have seen the problems coming and should have had firmer control over Capita. The ILA scheme is seen as a test case of what can go wrong in a public-private sector partnership if the original con tract isn't right. A comparison is expected to be drawn between the soft line that was taken with Capita and the hard line ministers have taken with the many learning providers complaining they were left severely out of pocket when the scheme was suddenly closed without warning late on November 23.

By that date 2.6 million people had opened ILAs, about 1.2 million had used them and the scheme had run about £70m over budget.

If ministers are to get the replacement ILA scheme right, the report will conclude, they must have a clearer view of what the aim is - a universal scheme open to all adults or a programme to encourage people who would otherwise not have done so to acquire some skills.